The Book of Proverbs, part of biblical canon, once a vital part of American
culture, tells us: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a
fall.”

It’s this haughty spirit, this pride that precedes destruction, that lies behind
the Supreme Court’s decision last week to bury the Defense of Marriage Act.

DOMA defined marriage, for purposes of federal law, as traditional marriage –
the union of man and woman.

This decision did not come out of nowhere. It did not happen in a vacuum. It is
but the latest in a long process of the unraveling of American culture driven by
pride – the sense that we answer to no higher authority. That the two-legged
animal man is master of the universe and decides, invents right and wrong, true
and false.

There have been many stops on the way to this Supreme Court decision relegating
marriage, as we have known and understood it for millennia, to a casual fiction
that could come out of Hollywood.

One stop we might note was the Supreme Court’s decision in 1980, Stone v Graham,
that said that posting the Ten Commandments in a public school is
unconstitutional.

A free society must start with a foundation of rules. If our biblical tradition
is not the source of these rules, what rules do define how we live and where do
these rules come from?

The preamble of our Constitution tells us that its purpose is to secure the
“blessings of liberty.”

Advertisement

What is a blessing? The first definition in my Webster’s New World Dictionary
says that a blessing is “a statement of divine favor”.

How can we secure divine favor in a nation for which the divine is
unconstitutional? A prideful nation by definition must be a nation that rejects
the idea of a blessing.

In the pride that precedes destruction in America of 2013, we reject that there
are truths that don’t come out of a laboratory. We reject that that there are
truths that parents get from their parents and pass on to their children.

We reject that there are truths that, when children learn them from their
parents, and embrace them and become responsible for them, they become adults.

So now we live in society in which there is nothing that distinguishes a child
from an adult, that distinguishes responsible from irresponsible.

Who suffers the most?

First and foremost, children. Because they are deprived from learning and taking
seriously the very rules of life’s road that are critical to live successfully.

Even more so, children from minority families.

67% of black children are raised in single parent households. The collapse of
black family life reflects this very welfare state materialism, bestowed to
blacks by elitist white liberals, that defines the culture that now rejects the
sanctity of traditional marriage.

Can there be any doubt that the grandparents and great grandparents of the five
Supreme Court Justices who just voted to delegitimize the sanctity of
traditional marriage in America would be appalled by the decisions of their
offspring?

Can there be any doubt that if the ancestors of these same Supreme Court
justices had the values that their offspring are selling today that that these
judges would most likely not be who they are and sitting where they sit?

America is a free country. You can do what you want in private.

But when values of meaninglessness become sanctioned as part of our public and
official culture we should know that this is the “pride” that “goes before
destruction.”

Let there be no doubt that same-sex marriage is about much more than marriage.
It is a deliberate and conscious assault on religion and all traditional values.

We have only two options. Turn back to where we belong or watch the continuing
collapse of our country.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal
and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based
public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle
Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do
About It.